In this article, Cristian Preda explores how French cultural diplomacy influenced the emergence of political science in post-communist Romania, highlighting the role of academic institutions and key actors in this educational transformation.
28. May 2025 | Cristian Preda | Universitatea Din Bucuresti (UB)
few hours after Ceaușescu’s escape from the building of the Central Committee of the PCR, the Council of the National Salvation Front was established, a revolutionary body that proclaimed the abandonment of single-partyism, the organization of free elections, the separation of powers and the restructuring of the economy, targets reached in the years immediately following, and then also reaching an issue that disturbs Romanian society to this day, namely “the reorganization of Romanian education according to contemporary requirements”. This was the sixth point of the document adopted on December 22, 1989, and it indicated, using fiery vocabulary, the means that would have solved the problem, namely “the resettlement of education structures on democratic and humanistic bases [by] eliminating the ideological dogmas that caused so much damage to the Romanian people”. The present article studies how such a reorganization, which promised to build education on a non-ideological foundation, was achieved. I took into account a particular case, but by no means insignificant, because it is about the creation of a new academic field, that of political science, within the most important Romanian educational institution of those times, the University of Bucharest (UB).
The issue has already been addressed by several Romanian authors. Daniel Barbu highlighted the birth, after 1989, of two ways of institutionalizing the investigation of politics – one post-Marxist-Leninist, assumed by former staff of the Ștefan Gheorghiu Academy, grouped in the National School of Political and Administrative Studies, and another, neo-Weberian, which he himself would have created at UB, while he was dean. Trained as a doctor and with a doctorate in social psychology, Alina Mungiu-Pippidi also described the transition from a so-called totalitarian “political science” that formed party activists to a genuine academic community, developed in several universities, but only after 1995.
Lavinia Stan very convincingly demonstrated the influence of the North American and, respectively, French political models in the construction of study programs in the university centers of Bucharest, Cluj and Iași. One of the graduates of the first generations of political scientists from University of Bucharest (UB), Luciana Ghica, denounced a university bias, which would have maintained the idea that Romanian specialists in this disciplinary field did not overcome a provincial complex. In Ghica’s opinion, Romanian political science has always been synchronized with that of other parts of Europe, including during the communist regime. Furthermore, Laurentiu Vlad, professor of history and cultural diplomacy, reconstructed the history of the first years of teaching political science in French at UB, in a volume that also includes some interesting interviews about the same period, conducted with eight professors.
I completed these forays into the past of domestic political science by exploiting some new sources and by detailing how French cultural diplomacy influenced the process of founding political science in post-December Romania. We have thus shown that academic institutions can be not only agents of cultural diplomacy, but also its products. I aimed, on the other hand, to analyze the result of the cultural transfer carried out: are we dealing, in the case studied, with an “independent periphery” or only with a “receptacle of some tendencies” that lose prestige in the place of origin, but which, once preserved in another place, give rise to radical reinterpretations or innovations? These were the two variants imagined by Michel Espagne, when he analyzed other cultural exchanges that produced effects in the human sciences. Since we have taken into account both internal and external actors competing to manufacture political science, the sources mobilized in the present analysis are extremely diverse. I was thus able to follow a project that failed after a year – that of the Faculty of Advanced Political Studies – and a second one, which led to the creation of the Faculté Internationale de Sciences Humaines and which produces effects to this day.
About the author
Cristian Preda
Professor for Political Science at University of Bucharest
Cristian Dan Preda is a professor of political science at the University of Bucharest. Preda is part of NARDIV’s Work Package 7 on Sustainability. Between 2009 and 2019, he was a Member of the European Parliament.